'JORDY' RESTORES WOMAN'S SIGHT

Ruth McClelland lost her home and her "best friend" in Hurricane Frances.

On Thursday, the 80-year-old from Okeechobee got a new best friend with the same name: "Jordy."

McClelland, who has macular degeneration and glaucoma, is legally blind. For the last four years, she's used a Jordy Vision Enhancement System to read.

But when Frances blew away the mobile home where she'd lived for 20 years, it blew away McClelland's Jordy as well.

"I haven't been able to read anything in a month," McClelland said -- not the morning paper, her Bible or the letters that have been piling up. "My Jordy was really my best friend."

At the Jupiter Eye Clinic on Thursday, Dr. Scott Hearing fitted McClelland with a new best friend.

The Jordy system includes a set of goggles that uses two digital cameras controlled by a miniature computer that magnifies and shows images on a built-in, postage stamp-sized digital television set.

The goggles also can be plugged into a scanner that "reads" pages of books, newspapers or correspondence, greatly magnifies them and "plays" them on a full-sized television monitor.

McClelland gave her new Jordy a test drive by reading a page put into the machine; then she put on the goggles to look around the examination room.

"I didn't know you had a mustache," she said as she looked at Hearing.

The new system will take some getting used to. The goggles are lighter and the new system more advanced than McClelland's first set, which she inherited from a Hobe Sound dentist who was entering a nursing home. Hearing has arranged for the new system to be set up in the house McClelland moved into Tuesday.

McClelland has shown she has no trouble adapting to change. She's already learned how to live a low-vision life.

For the 19 years, she's been a volunteer at Raulerson Hospital in Okeechobee.

"I've memorized where everything is," McClelland said. "And I can recognize most of the people by their voice or their body shape or the way they walk."

She plays bingo because she's memorized where the numbers are on all seven of the cards she's been playing with for the last nine years.

The cards were in a cedar chest at McClelland's house when Frances hit.

"I just knew they were going to be gone," she said. "But my son pulled the wall that had fallen down off the chest and pulled them out. I was afraid I was going to have to memorize another set."

Now all Hearing, whose Visual Health also has an office in Stuart, needs to do is pay for McClelland's renewed eyesight.

Usually $4,000, Hearing got a 50 percent discount from the Jordy manufacturer; and anonymous donors kicked in $800. That leaves $1,200 to be paid.

"When I get Jordys for kids," Hearing said, "raising money is no problem. It's tougher getting donations for senior citizens."